And it should be noted that in the antitrust trial, the findings of fact said that one of the ways in which MS abused its monopoly power was by charging OEMs per processor, not per copy of Windows shipped.
My boss at the time actually downloaded and printed the whole thing:) He is one of those, "I hate Microsoft, but I exclusively use their products, and make a living off of them" kind of guys.
One thing I remember from back then was how MS screwed over IBM. They sold IBM Windows at a higher price because they had a competing operating system, OS/2, and strongarmed them into trying to not let them let out the secret that there were other OSes besides Windows. Also, they double screwed IBM by delaying their OEM licenses until after the "back to school" sales rush.
I actually forgot about that crap. No wonder I quit that job, and quit using MS products soon after that.
What a lowpoint in my life. More info about that wonderful company and the "findings of fact" here:
they at least on the surface seem legit. I'm not much of a sports fan. I'm a geek and an academic, and I believe sports are way overdone in college, but people love college basketball, and the NCAA provides a service to these people by organizing the tournaments and whatnot. People voluntarily dump money to these guys. I mean people love sports. Ever hear how much a 30 second spot during the superbowl is? And companies are more than willing to go out of their way to pay it, and they even _compete_ with the ads nowadays.
You could also look at professional sports as being a very successful marketing campaign. These people are young and dumb and are given all the cash in the world and they are expected to blow it all on bling, where the bling pushers profit. MTV Cribs is no accident, and often shows black athletes that are "successful" with all of their toys and whatnot. I live in an area that has a fairly high black population, and I would assume that these people make less money than I do based on where they live and whatnot, but the toys these guys have. Its as if they are trying to recreate the images shown on MTV videos and on Cribs. I don't see 22" rims nationally advertised anywhere else, do you?
Or... if you still like the artists but hate the RIAA, buy the CD used. No more money goes back to the RIAA and you still have the CD.
To take it one step further, then rip the CD, post the torrent, and then resell the CD!
Honestly, this is just like the patent lawyer feigning to be a businessman. This crap has gotten so out of control that this is NOT about music, business or anything like that. This is a lawyer game, just like the SCO thing.
If the companies that are sponsoring the RIAA actually believe that this is a means to increase their bottom line, then all of them must of dropped out of school and are just stupid business people to begin with.
Unless it was not press worthy or I never paid attention before, I have never heard of the business via suing people business model until recent years.
For some reason, I used to think it was wrong or whatever to dl music instead of paying for it, but I have changed my mind. These people simply do not offer products that people want anymore. MP3s are almost a decade old to the average user, yet its practically illegal to use your MP3 player. iTunes, and a few other places online offer MP3s, but you cannot buy them in a store. A healthy business model would have started shipping all new CDs with either 2 layers or on 2 disks where one has the standard CD format, and the other would have MP3s in different bitrates already encoded.
What other commodity item that you buy do you have to go home and waste your time rearranging the content so that it will work on something as ubiquitous as a CD and an iPod? Well, maybe uncooked food is that way, but when cassette decks came out, the record biz immediately started selling cassettes. When CDs came out, the record biz immediately started selling CDs. When DVDs came out, VHS, 8-tracks, you name it, the people were willing to simply sell you content for the new and better technology. I mean, shit, even worthless formats like the recently dead Sony UDF or whatever had content for a while until everybody realized it was shit.
In 2006, still no MP3s.
Now, they say, fuck you, I'll just sue you into buying our 30 year old technology, and you'll like it.
Then who wants competition? Only if I had a business, with a ligitiment patent would I then want competition, and lots of it. So that they can do all the work, and license the patent from me.
Competition is healthy, normal, and exciting.
Ever seen a close basketball game or tennis match? Ever see people try to beat the traffic when their home team is killing the visitors?
Patents are like one tennis player using a rocket powered service racket where even if the other player gets their normal racket on the ball, the ball would go right through it.
An intelligent person is willing to adjust to some changes in life, make some sacrifices, and just about do anything to ensure they can continue to survive.
"It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value."
-- Arthur C. Clarke
A truly intelligent person is also willing to take a "normal" job, if it means paying the bills - if the alternative is to sit around moping about how unfair life is because there are no jobs suited for them.
Whether or not this correlates to a high IQ is another matter entirely.
I'm not sure of the point here. I was making a point that "normal" stuff is, well, more normal than super intelligent stuff. Its not uncommon for people to be laid off or have their employer go out of business or whatever and its not uncommon for it to take 6 months+ to find a similar kind of job. Its also not uncommon for people to have savings to live 6+ plus with little to no income.
Well, actually, with the bling-bling attitude here in the US, scratch the savings... Gotta have that Hummer and that huge interest only house, right? Thats the sign of real intelligence.
If you're that intelligent, you'd realize that you're the odd-man-out and then get on with whatever you like doing.
I agree 100%. But nothing is that simple. You either have to get yourself completely juiced in with others that are like you, which is very unlikely, or you have to have skills or learn if you can to convince the other 99.x% of the population that your "worthy".
Even if you're juiced in with bright people, they are good at other things that you don't have, and vice versa. Back to there is no real Spearman g. I work with very bright people from all over the world, but they do "stupid" stuff, and its often difficult for me to deal with that, as well as with what I'm good at doing. And, trust me, those people know things that I have no clue about.
It remains to this day the single most effective quantitative predictor of future employment status and economic success.
Economic status. I pretty much agree. Employment status, I disagree.
If I were unemployed right now, it would take me 6 months+ to find a "job". "Normal" people can find a job in a day or two, max.
I see many more ads in the paper for "normal" jobs, but for jobs that fit a level of intelligence and expertise, those are rare, and often require relocation, which costs money and are difficult if a wife and family are involved.
Also, there are so many different kinds of intelligence that an IQ test is pretty much meaningless.
Very true. I've studied cognitive, behavioral, and developmental psych, and have come to the conclusion that there is no Spearman g out there.
Good athletes are bright. Look at how they are talked about. "That was a brilliant play!" "What was he thinking?" People talk about them in terms of their cognition, not in terms of their strength or stamina. Now, I'm not saying that these are important things, but for athletes the physical thing is almost even. Its the cognition that is different. Otherwise, why would they need to practice? Just lift weights or do whatever.
I'm not trying to toot my horn, but I was a very slow starter. It took me 2 colleges (one, another, and back to the first) and about 8 years to get a college degree from a mediocre college, but I'm not a dummy. Again, I don't fully subscribe to the Spearman g thing, but I've taken IQ tests and have scored up to 140, but have had numerous issues over the years, and many people think I'm "dumb", kinda like the absent minded professor thing, I guess.
I also have a severe mental illness, and my cognitive abilities and personality vary from time to time. I also have substance abuse issues. I "self medicate", which I have no problem with, it helps me. Much better than a doctor can, but it does impair my cognition from time to time. I've heard that people that stop doing drugs gain on average about 10 IQ points after some period of time.
Honestly, I see the world a little bit differently than "normal" people. I've smoked cigarettes since I was a kid, and when I was 16 and I would see a pile of cigarettes in a pile in a parking lot, I thought that the people would sit there and smoke that many cigarettes at a time and make a pile. Only later did I figure out that the people dumped their ashtray in the parking lot. I guess that since I see the world as doing extreme and weird things like I do, that "normal" things like littering appear as abnormal to me. So, I think about the situation more. I also was a master knot tier when I was 11. I could tie any knot known in record speed. It took me until about 28 or 29 to figure out that a square knot was the best way to tie a shoe. I also had issues with my 5th grade teacher calling my house because my shoes would not stay tied, but did not comment on the A+ papers I wrote.
The world is set up for average people. Yeah, it may take a while for above average people to come out of the woodwork, but majority (aka, mediocrity) rules. If you want special accommodations in the US, be handicapped. You get whatever you "need" with no questions asked. But if your bright, you're on you're own. I was homeless a few years ago, and I called government services, and there was no help for able people that were temporarily out of luck. In retrospect, I did not need the help, but I thought it would be nice to have it, and assumed that there were housing or financial help for someone like me, but I was not fucked up enough.
Also, as many, if not most, of slashdotters know, that IQ has nothing to do with anything. It has its advantages and disadvantages. I purposely have to dumb down myself, and just "shoot the shit" to get along with people. Its OK, but I'm lonely much of the time because I know that most people simply have no idea what I know. I've met a couple of people here on slashdot that post almost exactly like I do, and think almost the same way. Multiple times, I have come across a user that I wanted to add as a friend, and realized that they already were, and once seeing their username, I remembered them.
Or is Stallman just a brilliant guy with some signs of lunacy?
It comes with the turf. No big deal. He's a cool dude. I could not imagine life w/o GNU software. Its quality stuff.
Actually, I thought this was one of his most mellow talks ever, from what I read. I love the tidbit about flash and word files. Amen. If I never, ever see one of those again, that would be fine by me.
Back on this lunacy thing, there really does appear to be a Gaussian distribution in things like human behavior. Most of it is boring, in the middle, stuff. And then we have the freaks at the tails. That is where the fun is, but don't be surprised if you find yourself in one of those tails if your a little lonely and you don't get along with many people.
Extremists are freaks by definition. But they do good stuff. Is the NRA extreme? Yup. Do I own a gun or care that much? No. Am I glad that every single piece of legislation against gun control or whatever is adamantly opposed by the NRA? Hell yeah. It makes me feel better knowing that there are compounds out there with trained and armed individuals that are ready and willing to protect themselves and myself from the government. Keeps the fuckers on their toes.
But really. I mean New Orleans is not known to be the most uncorrupt place in the planet, although I hear its _much_ better than it used to be. But between this guy, and the Minnesota governor or whoever that was telling the state's employees to "break the law" and buy prescriptions from Canada, is a little strange to me.
Sure, we realize that 80-90% of what they do is just for fun and games, and of course PROFIT! But to me publicly saying, "Yeah, the laws are dumb" is not something I would call politically correct. The laws that have very severe penalties do not really affect me, because those are things I'm not too interested in doing in the first place, but minor felonies and misdemeanors that have a low possibility of even being arrested or investigated into, I could care less because the law is wrong in those cases. I live in a police state, and many normal things that people do every day are still classified as felonies and/or misdemeanors. I'm not a gangster or anything.
But I'm not a lawmaker. That is the difference. I know what is OK and not OK to do, and what I can and cannot get away with, and I'm mostly OK with that. Sure, there are always going to be racial, sexist, and religious laws that are stupid, but who cares?
A patent system encourages people to take risks - to eat ramen and live in a 1 bedroom efficiency, spending every waking hour coding / soldering / testing / brainstorming, because they can be reasonably assured that once their product gets to market, they'll have a reasonable amount of time to earn money to compensate them for the time they spent in R&D.
I'm not trolling here, but can someone give one real world example where this theory has been put into practice?
Yes, that is the theory behind patents, but the thing is that it is very, very expensive and a very, very, long time to resolve civil court cases. Even if they are cut and dry.
Seriously, though, I didn't understand the point in the article where he was like "everyone knows email is broken." Really? Who is everybody? Everybody I know uses email pretty well, thanks.
I would guess that the only thing "broken" about email is the fact that there is SPAM and viruses. I have a filter for that and the couple mails a week that escapes I either call the people and tell them to stop sending me mail or I just delete it if its foreign or just one of those mails that is unreadable and gibberish.
Aside from that, email is great. Its cool that HTML email has almost disappeared. Maybe its who I work with, but I only get HTML email from some marketers and other similar kind of people. Sometimes I get one from a manager, but its the exception, not the rule.
Another "broken" thing that people do is use email as a file transfer medium. Wrong tool for the job, but very seductive. It took me a while to convince (almost) a manager that it is possible to email a URL to someone and for them to download the file at their leisure and not fill up their HD with crap they probably don't want.
Email is good. After running water and electricity, it seems like something I simply could not imagine life without.
GigE to the console, unified desktop system. You have three or four builds of different machines (Laptop, High-performance desktop, 'Information worker' desktop, kiosk) with an imaged pushed every night. Users data is stored nonlocally, in mapped network drives. Expensive to implement? Sure. Cost savings in the long run? You betcha!
Are you telling me that you can't boot these machines from a bootable CD?
Something is wrong with the mentality in the computing world when people actually believe that wiping a machine that has no local storage every night is the only way to get a reliable system.
To me, this sounds like a networked Commodore 64, Atari 2600 or 800, or Apple ][ or something from the early 80s. The only difference here is that its networked.
Microsoft. Thanks for giving incompetent people things to do for the past 20+ years. Kinda like a lolly pop and a yo-yo with a monitor.
At least where I work, in the educational sector, that's impossible. The time spent retraining faculty and staff alone would outweigh the security benefits, especially when you consider all the specialized software floating around that hasn't been ported (curse you, Department of Education).
Nothing is impossible when it comes to changing man made things. Nothing.
All you have to do is wait until Apple gets the x86 thing together and there is a native virtual machine to run your legacy Windows/DOS apps in, and then tell the suppliers to make a native OS X version or screw off.
I mean, its not that tough to put a mac in front of people and have them use it. People that come over to my house are slowly seeing the light. Its a little (very little) difficult at first to realize that Safari is the web browser, etc. But after 2 minutes of me showing them, it goes pretty smoothly. After a while, and they go back to using a Windows box, they miss the out of your way-ness of the Mac. They look and feel, I know they want to switch, but they are not in the market for a new computer Win or Mac.
Personally, I don't see MS in the OS business after 15 years. They were never good at it, and there are plenty of options today.
Microsoft has screwed up for so long, in such a bad way, that now they can't even recommend using their operating system anymore?
Yes, I know I'm borderline troll, here, but lets look at the progress over the years here with Microsoft OSes:
1) DOS
Not much of an operating system. In fact, it does not meet my definition of an operating system. It started out as a purchased in house rip off of CPM or whatever, and IBM was conned into bundling it with their monopoly PC biz at the time. It took years to add features like memory management, disk caching, multi-tasking was a joke. Reliability was abysmal. Yuck. How did a company start from that?
2) Windows 1.0 - 3.x where x 1
Junk. Nobody used it, except towards the 3.x days, and even then people dropped to DOS much of the time.
3) Windows 3.1 and 3.11. Yes, this was the first viable product from the company, but barely. This came out in 1993. Yes, 1993. And it only then almost had the functionality of a Xerox Star from 1981.
4) NT 3.51. The first time I sat behind one of these, I was amazed. This was the first solid 32bit offering I used and it just felt solid and real. Same ugly interface for 3.1x, but this was a real operating system.
5) Windows 95. Its claim to fame was that Mac people called it MacOS from 1984. Honestly, it was their greatest achievement to date after conning their way with IBM. I was pleased when it came out. It had issues, but was OK for the time.
6) NT 4.0. Late to market, but OK. basically 3.51 with 95 UI and some other enhancements. decent for a small company or workstation I guess at the time.
7) Win 98. Better than 95, especially with OSR2 or whatever it was called. Introduced USB and plug and play, but neither worked well.
8) Win ME. No comment besides this was the alpha quality OS that was the beginning of the merge between DOS/Win to NT. Everybody knows this was junk.
9) Win2k Added stability for the first time to their systems. This is where they took a bad UI and started making it worse. Slow as a dog.
10) XP. Never really used it, but again, more stability, aside from the fact that the legacy support from bullet #1 is now an infectious target for malware, viruses, spyware, worms, trojans, you name it, if you don't want it, it will be on your newly installed computer in seconds without a firewall. Sometime after XP came out, MS took a week or two off of writing cutting edge code to get their security in gear. We all appreciate that, right?
11) Vista. Looks like a revamping of Win2k. Bad UI made worse, and will be slow as a dog. Nothing to see here, please move along.
What I noticed in typing this, is that MS is _always_ about 10 years behind where the progress should be. Its now 2006, and XP is a clowny looking thing from the mid 90s. I will say that they sure know how to sell stuff to people. They get an A++ for that, but innovation and quality have never been their forte.
You can answer messages when they come in or wait until you're ready and format the messages however you want. Most collaboration systems require a lot of user focus either to respond in real time or to satisfy strict interface requirements. E-mail allows people to communicate in their own way, not the way of the application.
So true. I get pissed when people try to communicate with me via phone. Its easier now because I have a cell that is always on me (and it works), but phone tag is obnoxious.
I never had a job before email.
How in the world did people communicate before email?
Seriously. I do not know what people did. Did they write snail mail letters and/or phone tag each other? What a waste of time. I email people sitting next to me because its a damn good form of communication. It keeps records, discussions are threaded, no real time pressure to reply, but even without that constraint, I don't know that phone tag or snail mail could have anywhere near a faster reply.
"Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." -- Albert Einstein
Clearly, Sony is insane.
For at least 30 years now, they have come up with proprietary format after proprietary format, and they fail, because (drum roll....) they are a proprietary format.
DVDs were an excellent step. Same form factor of a CD. No rewinding. Open standard. Plays in cars (why??), TVs, DVD players, computers, portables, etc. The quality was much better than VHS and it is flexible.
What also kills me is that much of Sony's proprietary formats are actually good. Beta was good, and still used in professional stuff I believe. ATRAC3 is good. I've never heard it though, just read about it, and it did take 3 revisions of the doomed format to get good, but it does not matter, nobody will use it because Sony doesn't want them to. Memory stick. Who cares? There are open standards for the same technology. Memory stick is unnecessary. Their blue ray will fail as well. It kills me that they were talking about how it was some form of a feature that Sony films would not be able to be played via Sony blue ray equipment because it was DRMed to hell so good. Now, UMD.
These people are insane. Even Microsoft is starting to learn that proprietary file formats are not seen as a value to people, and they are slowly taking the proprietary "features" out of IE.
Mark this as flamebait if you will, but this can easily be attributed to the placebo effect.
I don't believe so. I do believe in the placebo effect, but I don't think that this is the case. They are not overtly telling the people that they will need less medication, etc. And they are doing this preemptively, not realtime like the placebo effect.
There is a mind/body interaction. People with healthy relationships with a significant other get sick less often, etc. There are plenty of experiments like this. One that I read about was that basketball players that merely thought about making free throws for a week or so vs people spending the same amount of time actually practicing free throws improved at the same rate. A positive attitude is very healthy. Fear puts nasty chemicals in the brain.
Try this:
Lie to someone and tell them to be careful when touching it, but instead of it being hot, make it ice cold. When they touch it, they will flinch back at the spinal column level of latency, not at the brain level.
Give it a little while. Ten years ago, people thought 16MB of RAM was excessive. Ten years before that, 512KB was considered a luxury.
Most laptops, if boxed today and shipped to "super computing" sites 10 years ago would have had much better performance than those rooms of machines that they had. Not to mention the power/cooling etc.
Slashdot Mirror
And it should be noted that in the antitrust trial, the findings of fact said that one of the ways in which MS abused its monopoly power was by charging OEMs per processor, not per copy of Windows shipped.
:) He is one of those, "I hate Microsoft, but I exclusively use their products, and make a living off of them" kind of guys.
t icleID=18991&DisplayTab=Article
My boss at the time actually downloaded and printed the whole thing
One thing I remember from back then was how MS screwed over IBM. They sold IBM Windows at a higher price because they had a competing operating system, OS/2, and strongarmed them into trying to not let them let out the secret that there were other OSes besides Windows. Also, they double screwed IBM by delaying their OEM licenses until after the "back to school" sales rush.
I actually forgot about that crap. No wonder I quit that job, and quit using MS products soon after that.
What a lowpoint in my life. More info about that wonderful company and the "findings of fact" here:
http://www.windowsitpro.com/Articles/Index.cfm?Ar
What's the point of getting a monopoly if you don't abuse it?
f or_Life
World domination, being the richest person in the world, basic stuff like that.
OTOH, there are things like the Benevolent Dictator at the human level like found here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benevolent_Dictator_
Just because I'm 6'4", and weigh almost 300 lbs does not mean that I have to destroy anyone under 6' tall and weighs less than 200 lbs does it?
Its difficult to tell if you are for or against the patent, no competition thing.
Regarding the NCAA, I believe you are misinformed or know something that few do.
From here: http://www2.ncaa.org/portal/about_ncaa/budget_and
they at least on the surface seem legit. I'm not much of a sports fan. I'm a geek and an academic, and I believe sports are way overdone in college, but people love college basketball, and the NCAA provides a service to these people by organizing the tournaments and whatnot. People voluntarily dump money to these guys. I mean people love sports. Ever hear how much a 30 second spot during the superbowl is? And companies are more than willing to go out of their way to pay it, and they even _compete_ with the ads nowadays.
You could also look at professional sports as being a very successful marketing campaign. These people are young and dumb and are given all the cash in the world and they are expected to blow it all on bling, where the bling pushers profit. MTV Cribs is no accident, and often shows black athletes that are "successful" with all of their toys and whatnot. I live in an area that has a fairly high black population, and I would assume that these people make less money than I do based on where they live and whatnot, but the toys these guys have. Its as if they are trying to recreate the images shown on MTV videos and on Cribs. I don't see 22" rims nationally advertised anywhere else, do you?
Buy a PC with no OS with just a formatted disk full of MP3s, and get MSFT and RIAA at your door!
Bonus points for putting ripped DVDs on there.
Automatic A if you put a copy of GPLed rpms from SCO.
Beware, I have a patent on this, and I will be at your door as well.
Or... if you still like the artists but hate the RIAA, buy the CD used. No more money goes back to the RIAA and you still have the CD.
To take it one step further, then rip the CD, post the torrent, and then resell the CD!
Honestly, this is just like the patent lawyer feigning to be a businessman. This crap has gotten so out of control that this is NOT about music, business or anything like that. This is a lawyer game, just like the SCO thing.
If the companies that are sponsoring the RIAA actually believe that this is a means to increase their bottom line, then all of them must of dropped out of school and are just stupid business people to begin with.
Unless it was not press worthy or I never paid attention before, I have never heard of the business via suing people business model until recent years.
For some reason, I used to think it was wrong or whatever to dl music instead of paying for it, but I have changed my mind. These people simply do not offer products that people want anymore. MP3s are almost a decade old to the average user, yet its practically illegal to use your MP3 player. iTunes, and a few other places online offer MP3s, but you cannot buy them in a store. A healthy business model would have started shipping all new CDs with either 2 layers or on 2 disks where one has the standard CD format, and the other would have MP3s in different bitrates already encoded.
What other commodity item that you buy do you have to go home and waste your time rearranging the content so that it will work on something as ubiquitous as a CD and an iPod? Well, maybe uncooked food is that way, but when cassette decks came out, the record biz immediately started selling cassettes. When CDs came out, the record biz immediately started selling CDs. When DVDs came out, VHS, 8-tracks, you name it, the people were willing to simply sell you content for the new and better technology. I mean, shit, even worthless formats like the recently dead Sony UDF or whatever had content for a while until everybody realized it was shit.
In 2006, still no MP3s.
Now, they say, fuck you, I'll just sue you into buying our 30 year old technology, and you'll like it.
My response: fuck you back.
Then who wants competition? Only if I had a business, with a ligitiment patent would I then want competition, and lots of it. So that they can do all the work, and license the patent from me.
Competition is healthy, normal, and exciting.
Ever seen a close basketball game or tennis match? Ever see people try to beat the traffic when their home team is killing the visitors?
Patents are like one tennis player using a rocket powered service racket where even if the other player gets their normal racket on the ball, the ball would go right through it.
An intelligent person is willing to adjust to some changes in life, make some sacrifices, and just about do anything to ensure they can continue to survive.
"It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value."
-- Arthur C. Clarke
A truly intelligent person is also willing to take a "normal" job, if it means paying the bills - if the alternative is to sit around moping about how unfair life is because there are no jobs suited for them.
Whether or not this correlates to a high IQ is another matter entirely.
I'm not sure of the point here. I was making a point that "normal" stuff is, well, more normal than super intelligent stuff. Its not uncommon for people to be laid off or have their employer go out of business or whatever and its not uncommon for it to take 6 months+ to find a similar kind of job. Its also not uncommon for people to have savings to live 6+ plus with little to no income.
Well, actually, with the bling-bling attitude here in the US, scratch the savings... Gotta have that Hummer and that huge interest only house, right? Thats the sign of real intelligence.
So what if they're copying your business methods - thats called competition.
Nobody that uses patents as their business model wants competition. Just ask Tom Woolston.
Hint. He's a patent attorney, who loves to be his own customer.
If you're that intelligent, you'd realize that you're the odd-man-out and then get on with whatever you like doing.
I agree 100%. But nothing is that simple. You either have to get yourself completely juiced in with others that are like you, which is very unlikely, or you have to have skills or learn if you can to convince the other 99.x% of the population that your "worthy".
Even if you're juiced in with bright people, they are good at other things that you don't have, and vice versa. Back to there is no real Spearman g. I work with very bright people from all over the world, but they do "stupid" stuff, and its often difficult for me to deal with that, as well as with what I'm good at doing. And, trust me, those people know things that I have no clue about.
It remains to this day the single most effective quantitative predictor of future employment status and economic success.
Economic status. I pretty much agree. Employment status, I disagree.
If I were unemployed right now, it would take me 6 months+ to find a "job". "Normal" people can find a job in a day or two, max.
I see many more ads in the paper for "normal" jobs, but for jobs that fit a level of intelligence and expertise, those are rare, and often require relocation, which costs money and are difficult if a wife and family are involved.
Also, there are so many different kinds of intelligence that an IQ test is pretty much meaningless.
Very true. I've studied cognitive, behavioral, and developmental psych, and have come to the conclusion that there is no Spearman g out there.
Good athletes are bright. Look at how they are talked about. "That was a brilliant play!" "What was he thinking?" People talk about them in terms of their cognition, not in terms of their strength or stamina. Now, I'm not saying that these are important things, but for athletes the physical thing is almost even. Its the cognition that is different. Otherwise, why would they need to practice? Just lift weights or do whatever.
I'm not trying to toot my horn, but I was a very slow starter. It took me 2 colleges (one, another, and back to the first) and about 8 years to get a college degree from a mediocre college, but I'm not a dummy. Again, I don't fully subscribe to the Spearman g thing, but I've taken IQ tests and have scored up to 140, but have had numerous issues over the years, and many people think I'm "dumb", kinda like the absent minded professor thing, I guess.
I also have a severe mental illness, and my cognitive abilities and personality vary from time to time. I also have substance abuse issues. I "self medicate", which I have no problem with, it helps me. Much better than a doctor can, but it does impair my cognition from time to time. I've heard that people that stop doing drugs gain on average about 10 IQ points after some period of time.
Honestly, I see the world a little bit differently than "normal" people. I've smoked cigarettes since I was a kid, and when I was 16 and I would see a pile of cigarettes in a pile in a parking lot, I thought that the people would sit there and smoke that many cigarettes at a time and make a pile. Only later did I figure out that the people dumped their ashtray in the parking lot. I guess that since I see the world as doing extreme and weird things like I do, that "normal" things like littering appear as abnormal to me. So, I think about the situation more. I also was a master knot tier when I was 11. I could tie any knot known in record speed. It took me until about 28 or 29 to figure out that a square knot was the best way to tie a shoe. I also had issues with my 5th grade teacher calling my house because my shoes would not stay tied, but did not comment on the A+ papers I wrote.
The world is set up for average people. Yeah, it may take a while for above average people to come out of the woodwork, but majority (aka, mediocrity) rules. If you want special accommodations in the US, be handicapped. You get whatever you "need" with no questions asked. But if your bright, you're on you're own. I was homeless a few years ago, and I called government services, and there was no help for able people that were temporarily out of luck. In retrospect, I did not need the help, but I thought it would be nice to have it, and assumed that there were housing or financial help for someone like me, but I was not fucked up enough.
Also, as many, if not most, of slashdotters know, that IQ has nothing to do with anything. It has its advantages and disadvantages. I purposely have to dumb down myself, and just "shoot the shit" to get along with people. Its OK, but I'm lonely much of the time because I know that most people simply have no idea what I know. I've met a couple of people here on slashdot that post almost exactly like I do, and think almost the same way. Multiple times, I have come across a user that I wanted to add as a friend, and realized that they already were, and once seeing their username, I remembered them.
I'm tired and drunk right now. Later.
Or is Stallman just a brilliant guy with some signs of lunacy?
It comes with the turf. No big deal. He's a cool dude. I could not imagine life w/o GNU software. Its quality stuff.
Actually, I thought this was one of his most mellow talks ever, from what I read. I love the tidbit about flash and word files. Amen. If I never, ever see one of those again, that would be fine by me.
Back on this lunacy thing, there really does appear to be a Gaussian distribution in things like human behavior. Most of it is boring, in the middle, stuff. And then we have the freaks at the tails. That is where the fun is, but don't be surprised if you find yourself in one of those tails if your a little lonely and you don't get along with many people.
Extremists are freaks by definition. But they do good stuff. Is the NRA extreme? Yup. Do I own a gun or care that much? No. Am I glad that every single piece of legislation against gun control or whatever is adamantly opposed by the NRA? Hell yeah. It makes me feel better knowing that there are compounds out there with trained and armed individuals that are ready and willing to protect themselves and myself from the government. Keeps the fuckers on their toes.
"I am above the law!"
Squeak of hair goo as bald spot gets recovered.
But really. I mean New Orleans is not known to be the most uncorrupt place in the planet, although I hear its _much_ better than it used to be. But between this guy, and the Minnesota governor or whoever that was telling the state's employees to "break the law" and buy prescriptions from Canada, is a little strange to me.
Sure, we realize that 80-90% of what they do is just for fun and games, and of course PROFIT! But to me publicly saying, "Yeah, the laws are dumb" is not something I would call politically correct. The laws that have very severe penalties do not really affect me, because those are things I'm not too interested in doing in the first place, but minor felonies and misdemeanors that have a low possibility of even being arrested or investigated into, I could care less because the law is wrong in those cases. I live in a police state, and many normal things that people do every day are still classified as felonies and/or misdemeanors. I'm not a gangster or anything.
But I'm not a lawmaker. That is the difference. I know what is OK and not OK to do, and what I can and cannot get away with, and I'm mostly OK with that. Sure, there are always going to be racial, sexist, and religious laws that are stupid, but who cares?
A patent system encourages people to take risks - to eat ramen and live in a 1 bedroom efficiency, spending every waking hour coding / soldering / testing / brainstorming, because they can be reasonably assured that once their product gets to market, they'll have a reasonable amount of time to earn money to compensate them for the time they spent in R&D.
I'm not trolling here, but can someone give one real world example where this theory has been put into practice?
Yes, that is the theory behind patents, but the thing is that it is very, very expensive and a very, very, long time to resolve civil court cases. Even if they are cut and dry.
Seriously, though, I didn't understand the point in the article where he was like "everyone knows email is broken." Really? Who is everybody? Everybody I know uses email pretty well, thanks.
I would guess that the only thing "broken" about email is the fact that there is SPAM and viruses. I have a filter for that and the couple mails a week that escapes I either call the people and tell them to stop sending me mail or I just delete it if its foreign or just one of those mails that is unreadable and gibberish.
Aside from that, email is great. Its cool that HTML email has almost disappeared. Maybe its who I work with, but I only get HTML email from some marketers and other similar kind of people. Sometimes I get one from a manager, but its the exception, not the rule.
Another "broken" thing that people do is use email as a file transfer medium. Wrong tool for the job, but very seductive. It took me a while to convince (almost) a manager that it is possible to email a URL to someone and for them to download the file at their leisure and not fill up their HD with crap they probably don't want.
Email is good. After running water and electricity, it seems like something I simply could not imagine life without.
GigE to the console, unified desktop system. You have three or four builds of different machines (Laptop, High-performance desktop, 'Information worker' desktop, kiosk) with an imaged pushed every night. Users data is stored nonlocally, in mapped network drives. Expensive to implement? Sure. Cost savings in the long run? You betcha!
Are you telling me that you can't boot these machines from a bootable CD?
Something is wrong with the mentality in the computing world when people actually believe that wiping a machine that has no local storage every night is the only way to get a reliable system.
To me, this sounds like a networked Commodore 64, Atari 2600 or 800, or Apple ][ or something from the early 80s. The only difference here is that its networked.
Microsoft. Thanks for giving incompetent people things to do for the past 20+ years. Kinda like a lolly pop and a yo-yo with a monitor.
At least where I work, in the educational sector, that's impossible. The time spent retraining faculty and staff alone would outweigh the security benefits, especially when you consider all the specialized software floating around that hasn't been ported (curse you, Department of Education).
Nothing is impossible when it comes to changing man made things. Nothing.
All you have to do is wait until Apple gets the x86 thing together and there is a native virtual machine to run your legacy Windows/DOS apps in, and then tell the suppliers to make a native OS X version or screw off.
I mean, its not that tough to put a mac in front of people and have them use it. People that come over to my house are slowly seeing the light. Its a little (very little) difficult at first to realize that Safari is the web browser, etc. But after 2 minutes of me showing them, it goes pretty smoothly. After a while, and they go back to using a Windows box, they miss the out of your way-ness of the Mac. They look and feel, I know they want to switch, but they are not in the market for a new computer Win or Mac.
Personally, I don't see MS in the OS business after 15 years. They were never good at it, and there are plenty of options today.
I just did a cursory search and found this:
http://www.sysinternals.com/Utilities/RootkitReve
The sysinternals guys seem to know Windows better than MS. Cool people to know if you are forced to use MS operating systems.
Microsoft has screwed up for so long, in such a bad way, that now they can't even recommend using their operating system anymore?
Yes, I know I'm borderline troll, here, but lets look at the progress over the years here with Microsoft OSes:
1) DOS
Not much of an operating system. In fact, it does not meet my definition of an operating system. It started out as a purchased in house rip off of CPM or whatever, and IBM was conned into bundling it with their monopoly PC biz at the time. It took years to add features like memory management, disk caching, multi-tasking was a joke. Reliability was abysmal. Yuck. How did a company start from that?
2) Windows 1.0 - 3.x where x 1
Junk. Nobody used it, except towards the 3.x days, and even then people dropped to DOS much of the time.
3) Windows 3.1 and 3.11. Yes, this was the first viable product from the company, but barely. This came out in 1993. Yes, 1993. And it only then almost had the functionality of a Xerox Star from 1981.
4) NT 3.51. The first time I sat behind one of these, I was amazed. This was the first solid 32bit offering I used and it just felt solid and real. Same ugly interface for 3.1x, but this was a real operating system.
5) Windows 95. Its claim to fame was that Mac people called it MacOS from 1984. Honestly, it was their greatest achievement to date after conning their way with IBM. I was pleased when it came out. It had issues, but was OK for the time.
6) NT 4.0. Late to market, but OK. basically 3.51 with 95 UI and some other enhancements. decent for a small company or workstation I guess at the time.
7) Win 98. Better than 95, especially with OSR2 or whatever it was called. Introduced USB and plug and play, but neither worked well.
8) Win ME. No comment besides this was the alpha quality OS that was the beginning of the merge between DOS/Win to NT. Everybody knows this was junk.
9) Win2k Added stability for the first time to their systems. This is where they took a bad UI and started making it worse. Slow as a dog.
10) XP. Never really used it, but again, more stability, aside from the fact that the legacy support from bullet #1 is now an infectious target for malware, viruses, spyware, worms, trojans, you name it, if you don't want it, it will be on your newly installed computer in seconds without a firewall. Sometime after XP came out, MS took a week or two off of writing cutting edge code to get their security in gear. We all appreciate that, right?
11) Vista. Looks like a revamping of Win2k. Bad UI made worse, and will be slow as a dog. Nothing to see here, please move along.
What I noticed in typing this, is that MS is _always_ about 10 years behind where the progress should be. Its now 2006, and XP is a clowny looking thing from the mid 90s. I will say that they sure know how to sell stuff to people. They get an A++ for that, but innovation and quality have never been their forte.
You can answer messages when they come in or wait until you're ready and format the messages however you want. Most collaboration systems require a lot of user focus either to respond in real time or to satisfy strict interface requirements. E-mail allows people to communicate in their own way, not the way of the application.
So true. I get pissed when people try to communicate with me via phone. Its easier now because I have a cell that is always on me (and it works), but phone tag is obnoxious.
I never had a job before email.
How in the world did people communicate before email?
Seriously. I do not know what people did. Did they write snail mail letters and/or phone tag each other? What a waste of time. I email people sitting next to me because its a damn good form of communication. It keeps records, discussions are threaded, no real time pressure to reply, but even without that constraint, I don't know that phone tag or snail mail could have anywhere near a faster reply.
What did people do before email?
DVD's don't need rewinding, but be sure to rotate them after you snap them into the case by pressing down with your finger.
I noticed that 50% of the time after I put my DVDs back in my case that they don't play correctly.
I then figured out that I was not rotating them clockwise when putting them in the case.
It took me years to figure that one out!
And even then I had to remember switching to counter clockwise when going into the Southern hemisphere.
Its a little known fact that DVDs do not work at the equator.
Hopefully, Sony will fix this with their Blue Ray technology, but....
You did remember that Sony was involved in the creation of the CD, right?
Involved, but not solely. Philips came up with it, it became a standard (until Sony decided to violate it!!!), etc.
Sony formats basically suck, and blue ray will die or not even get off the ground.
"Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." -- Albert Einstein
Clearly, Sony is insane.
For at least 30 years now, they have come up with proprietary format after proprietary format, and they fail, because (drum roll....) they are a proprietary format.
DVDs were an excellent step. Same form factor of a CD. No rewinding. Open standard. Plays in cars (why??), TVs, DVD players, computers, portables, etc. The quality was much better than VHS and it is flexible.
What also kills me is that much of Sony's proprietary formats are actually good. Beta was good, and still used in professional stuff I believe. ATRAC3 is good. I've never heard it though, just read about it, and it did take 3 revisions of the doomed format to get good, but it does not matter, nobody will use it because Sony doesn't want them to. Memory stick. Who cares? There are open standards for the same technology. Memory stick is unnecessary. Their blue ray will fail as well. It kills me that they were talking about how it was some form of a feature that Sony films would not be able to be played via Sony blue ray equipment because it was DRMed to hell so good. Now, UMD.
These people are insane. Even Microsoft is starting to learn that proprietary file formats are not seen as a value to people, and they are slowly taking the proprietary "features" out of IE.
Insanity.
Mark this as flamebait if you will, but this can easily be attributed to the placebo effect.
I don't believe so. I do believe in the placebo effect, but I don't think that this is the case. They are not overtly telling the people that they will need less medication, etc. And they are doing this preemptively, not realtime like the placebo effect.
There is a mind/body interaction. People with healthy relationships with a significant other get sick less often, etc. There are plenty of experiments like this. One that I read about was that basketball players that merely thought about making free throws for a week or so vs people spending the same amount of time actually practicing free throws improved at the same rate. A positive attitude is very healthy. Fear puts nasty chemicals in the brain.
Try this:
Lie to someone and tell them to be careful when touching it, but instead of it being hot, make it ice cold. When they touch it, they will flinch back at the spinal column level of latency, not at the brain level.
If the thing is room temperature, no flinching.
Give it a little while. Ten years ago, people thought 16MB of RAM was excessive. Ten years before that, 512KB was considered a luxury.
Most laptops, if boxed today and shipped to "super computing" sites 10 years ago would have had much better performance than those rooms of machines that they had. Not to mention the power/cooling etc.